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The internet is one of the most ethereal concepts in tech: it’s nowhere and everywhere, all at once. But if you could measure the thing, how much physical space would it take up?

Fortunately Randall Munroe of XKCD fame has answered the question in a fun way over on his What If? site. He explains:

There are a lot of ways to estimate the amount of information stored on the internet, but we can put an interesting upper bound on the number just by looking at how much storage space we (as a species) have purchased.

The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of 650 million hard drives per year. If most of them are 3.5″ drives, then that’s eight liters (two gallons) of hard drive per second.

This means the last few years of hard drive production-which, thanks to increasing size, represent a large chunk of global storage capacity-would just about fill an oil tanker. So, by that measure, the internet is smaller than an oil tanker.

In fact, this answer is just a snippet from a series of short “What if?” questions answered in a single post on his site. Go read the rest. [What If?]

“Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo will have to face the reality that their business model cannot be preserved forever. The world is changing and we’re going to call it out,” says the CEO of SodaStream.

“If the beverage industry had to create itself now from scratch, it wouldn’t do it the way it is. You don’t need factories, trucks, bottles and cans,” he says. “Transportation for carbonated drinks in the world utilizes 100 million barrels of oil every year. That is 20 times the BP disaster that hit the Gulf of Mexico.”

“I think it is criminal that the industry, led by two big companies, will do anything to protect their antiquated business model. They are generating 35 million bottles and cans every single day in the U.K. alone. World-wide it is one billion bottles and cans, most of which just go to trash, landfill, the oceans or parks. It’s insane,” Mr. Birnbaum added.

Now that he mentions it, that does seem wildly inefficient.

Of course, inefficient companies can last a long time thanks to all of that infrastructure in place. And if the industry is disrupted by a new company, there’s no guarantee that company will be SodaStream (which is one of the most shorted stocks on the market).

The best scientific evidence shows that global climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas), which emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

These greenhouse gases act like a bubble around the Earth, trapping heat in, and in turn, causing temperatures to rise on the planet’s surface. This phenomenon can be observed through shrinking glaciers, thawing of permafrost, rising sea levels and, yes stronger storms.

Superstorm Sandy brought unprecedented levels of flooding to areas across the Eastern seaboard. New York City and the Jersey Shore were particularly hard hit. In Manhattan, a record-breaking storm surge reached 14 feet, shuttering one of the largest transit systems in the world.

Although climate change did not cause the storm, a growing number of researchers say that climate change increases the severity of hurricanes, including stronger storm surges like the one in Manhattan. This on top of rising sea levels, which will leave many cities, including New York, partially underwater, means just one thing: To save our cities, we need to slow climate change.

To moderate the effects of climate change we must start by lowering greenhouse gas emissions, which involves investing in clean and renewable energies.

Renewable energy is energy that comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, tides and geothermal heat. Unlike oil, these energy sources won’t run out (although some are highly unpredictable) and carbon-neutral, so they d! on’t con tribute to climate change.

We aren’t just talking wind turbines and solar panels, though. People around the world are developing innovative and sometimes strange ways to decrease their dependence on oil and gas.

Wave Snakes use the natural up-and-down motion of waves to generate electricity.

The Wind Blimp is equipped with spinning blades to catch wind and generate energy.

Magenn Power Inc. developed its first wind blimp prototype in 2008. The MARS (Magenn Air Rotor System) is essentially an extremely lightweight wind turbine that is anchored to the ground by a tether. Helium is used to lift the blimp, which is equipped with spinning blades to catch wind, generating energy. The electricity is then transferred by the tether to either a power grid or batteries.

MARS has several advantages over other wind systems due to its size, weight, and the ability to operate in very light wind speeds. The blimp is transportable, easily deployed, and well-suited for off-site or rem! ote loca tions. The floating wind turbine also has the potential to produce electricity at under $.20 per kWh versus $.50 cents to $.99 cents per kWh for diesel.

Archimede is the first solar power plant to use molten salts as a heat transfer fluid to store energy from the sun.

Location: Syracuse, Sicily.

On July 14, 2010, Italian utility Enel unveiled “Archimede,” the world’s first solar power plant to use molten salts as a heat transfer fluid. The system contains 30,000 square meters (320,000 square feet) of parabolic mirrors that concentrate solar rays onto 5,400 meters of high heat-resistant pipes that carry the fluid molten salt. The fluid is then collected in special tanks and used to produce steam, which eventually contributes to electricity generation.

The salts — a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate — are an extremely efficient heat transfer mechanism. Unlike synthetic oils used in traditional concentrating solar plants, molten salt can work at much higher temperatures (up to 550°C instead of 390°C). The salts store enough energy to keep the plant generating power at night or on cloudy days, which is a common limitation of many renewable energy sources.

When I was in high school in the late 1970’s, we had workshop class as part of the “Industrial Arts” curriculum. It wasn’t quite clear why this was a required credit—we lived in suburb of Washington, D.C., and there were no factories around and most of my friends’ parents were lawyers and government workers. But learning how to use workshop tools—band saws, table saws, drill presses, and the like—was just part of a mid-twentieth-century American education. The bad kids made ninja throwing stars; the worst made bongs. I made a crude magazine stand that my parents tolerated until I left home; I was lucky to have kept all my fingers through the process. Meanwhile, girls were steered to “Home Economics” to learn about sewing, cooking, and painting, which was, in a sense, another form of required crafting and DIY education.

At home, I made Heathkit electronics kits, which involved soldering irons and weeks of painstaking work with wires and components but were the cheapest way to obtain something like a citizen’s band radio or a stereo amplifier. Chemistry kits had actual chemicals in them (as opposed to little more than baking soda and a ream of legalist warnings, as is now sadly the case), and were great fun. Anybody with a cool or temperamental car spent the weekend under the hood with a wrench, hopping it up and otherwise tinkering with its mechanics. “Taking things apart to see how they work” was just what kids did, and finding users for the parts launched countless fantastic machines, some of which actually worked.

But starting in the 1980s and 1990s, the romance of making things with your own hands started to fade. First manufacturing jobs were no longer a safe way to enter and stay in the middle class, and the workshop lost even its vocational appeal as the number of manufacturing workers in the employment rolls shrank. In its place came keyboards and screens. PCs were introduced, and all the good jobs used them; the school curriculum shifted to train kids to become “symbolic analysts,” to use the social-science phrase for white-collar information work. Computer class replaced shop class. School budget cuts in the 1990s were the nail in the coffin; once the generation of workshop teachers retired, they were rarely replaced; the tools were sold or put in storage.

Imported Asian electronics became better and cheaper than Heathkit gear, and the shift from individual electronic components like resistors and transistors and capacitors to inscrutable microchips and integrated circuits made soldering skills pointless. Electronics became disposable boxes with “no user serviceable parts inside,” as the warning labels put it. Heathkit left the kit business in 1992.

Cars evolved from carburetors and distributor caps that you could fiddle with to rule injection and electronic ignition that you couldn’t. Chips replaced mechanical parts. The new cars didn’t need as much maintenance, and even if you wanted to go under the hood there wasn’t much you could fix or modify, other than to change the oil and the oil filter. The working parts were hermetically sealed and locked down, a price we happily paid for reliability and minimal upkeep.

Just as shop class disappeared with school budget cuts, better opportunities in the workplace for women and gender equality killed Home Economics. Kids grew up with computer and video games, not wrenches and band saws. The best minds of a generation were seduced by software and the infinite worlds to be created online, and they made the digital age we all live in today. That is how the world shifted from atoms to bits. The transformation has gone on for thirty years, a generation, and it’s hard to argue with any of it.

But now, thirty years after “Industrial Arts” left the curriculum and large chunks of our manufacturing sectors have shifted overseas, there’s finally a reason to get your hands dirty again. As desktop fabrication tools go mainstream, it’s time to return “making things” to the high school curriculum, not as the shop class of old, but in the form of teaching design.

Today, schoolchildren learn how to use PowerPoint and Excel as part of their computer class, and they still learn to draw and sculpt in art class. But think how much better it would be if they could choose a third option: design class. Imagine a course where kids would learn to use free 3D CAD tools such as Sketchup or Autodesk 123D. Some would design buildings and fantastic structures, much as they sketch in their notebooks already. Others would create elaborate video game levels with landscapes and vehicles. And yet others would invent machines. Even better, imagine if each design classroom had a few 3D printers or a laser cutter. All those desktop design tools have a “Make” menu item. Kids could actually fabricate what they have drawn onscreen. Just consider what it would mean to them to hold something they dreamed up. This is how a generation of Makers will be created. This is how the next wave of manufacturing entrepreneurs will be born.

From the book: MAKERS: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. Copyright 2012 by Chris Anderson. Published by arrangement with Crown Business, a division of Random House,

The NY Times is reporting that unknown computer hackers who call themselves “Cutting Sword of Justice” have claimed responsibility for spreading a malicious virus into Saudi Aramco, the Saudi government-owned oil company that’s also the world’s largest, and destroying three-quarters of all its computers. The hackers used a similar virus as the government created virus, Flame.

But the Cutting Sword of Justice won’t be stopping there, they’re planning to do it again. According to their new Pastebin post below, the hackers plan to launch another cyber attack on Saudi Aramco at 5:00PM on Saturday, saying “be prepared for something you will see in your eyes and you will not be able to stop it.” Remember, this attack isn’t your typical DDoS attack of hacktivists from the past, it’s malicious software that infects and destroys computers. The last attack destroyed over 30,000 computers.

Here is what the Cutting Sword of Justice is threatening:

According to media which we rarely believe, Saudi Aramco is thinking that the 15 aug attack was done by us but with a man in the middle helping us with different kind of info and that’s the reason why the head management of Aramco is still investigating.. Garbage investigation.

What we’re going to do to prove our ability to do more? well, we don’t really need or even feel like proving anything to anyone and show them that we can, but here is a headline story:

we are going to make it, next week, once again, and you will not be able by 1% to stop us.

Date: 25 august 2012 Time: 21:00 GMT

That’s will happen for two reason: 1- you’re brutal and selfish to harm any employee just for the sake of expecting. 2- we do hate, hate a lot, arrogance.

Be prepared for something you will see in your eyes and you will not be able to stop it.

The Cutting Sword of Justice are a relatively unknown group of hackers who have targeted Saudi Aramco because of the Saudi government’s support for ‘oppressive measures’ in the Middle East. We’ll see what happens this Saturday. [NY Times]

The NY Times is reporting that unknown computer hackers who call themselves “Cutting Sword of Justice” have claimed responsibility for spreading a malicious virus into Saudi Aramco, the Saudi government-owned oil company that’s also the world’s largest, and destroying three-quarters of all its computers. The hackers used a similar virus as the government created virus, Flame.

But the Cutting Sword of Justice won’t be stopping there, they’re planning to do it again. According to their new Pastebin post below, the hackers plan to launch another cyber attack on Saudi Aramco at 5:00PM on Saturday, saying “be prepared for something you will see in your eyes and you will not be able to stop it.” Remember, this attack isn’t your typical DDoS attack of hacktivists from the past, it’s malicious software that infects and destroys computers. The last attack destroyed over 30,000 computers.

Here is what the Cutting Sword of Justice is threatening:

According to media which we rarely believe, Saudi Aramco is thinking that the 15 aug attack was done by us but with a man in the middle helping us with different kind of info and that’s the reason why the head management of Aramco is still investigating.. Garbage investigation.

What we’re going to do to prove our ability to do more? well, we don’t really need or even feel like proving anything to anyone and show them that we can, but here is a headline story:

we are going to make it, next week, once again, and you will not be able by 1% to stop us.

Date: 25 august 2012 Time: 21:00 GMT

That’s will happen for two reason: 1- you’re brutal and selfish to harm any employee just for the sake of expecting. 2- we do hate, hate a lot, arrogance.

Be prepared for something you will see in your eyes and you will not be able to stop it.

The Cutting Sword of Justice are a relatively unknown group of hackers who have targeted Saudi Aramco because of the Saudi government’s support for ‘oppressive measures’ in the Middle East. We’ll see what happens this Saturday. [NY Times]

In perhaps the most predictable move of all time, thousands of people have created “ads” (featuring Shell’s “Let’s Go” slogan) that tear the company to shreds over its impact on global warming and wildlife. It ranges from absolutely hilarious to completely nasty. Virtually no one took Shell’s lead in creating heartwarming, “thanks for saving the day!” copy.

“But why?” some naive Shell social media manager is surely asking as he packs up his desk. Well, wanna know the kind of people who love snarky memes? The kind of people who don’t love Shell. Shell, meet the internet.

“The market is in serious crisis,” said Pekka Pesonen, head of the Copa-Cogeca farming union in Brussels. “This crop is vital for the main producing countries in terms of maintaining employment in their rural areas.”…The price of premium-quality extra virgin olive oil in the wholesale market fell this month to $2,900 a tonne, the lowest since 2002 and down more than half from nearly $6,000 a tonne in 2005, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Olive oil is also suffering from a major supply glut and increased competition from cheaper vegetable oil alternatives.

Getting ketchup out of a bottle is a massive unsolved engineering problem. Plastic squeezy bottles, upside down bottles, tapping the 57, just shove a butter knife in there—none really does the job. But the wonderful nerds at MIT might have done it with their new non-stick LiquiGlide bottle.

LiquiGlide is actually a coating made up of super-slick materials that’s food-safe and can work on plastic, glass, or other types of packaging. Its creator, Dave Smith at MIT, told Fast Company, LiquiGlide is “kind of a structured liquid—it’s rigid like a solid, but it’s lubricated like a liquid.”

The long term goals—beyond cracking the $17 billion bottle industry—are anti-clogging for oil and fuel lines, or building a better, non-icing windshield. For now, though, check out the amazing video of your not-too-distant hot-dog topping future. [FastCo]

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.